[ghufran_syed]

So government intervention didn't do what it claimed, in fact the opposite, and the solution (per "Democratic health care wonks") is to...have more government intervention? The leaches didn't work to help your diabetes, so we should apply more leaches?

[mandevil]

Things are far better than they were before the government intervention. The consolidation had started happening before the ACA was passed (e.g. Bill Frist and Rick Scott both became rich enough to be senators thanks to hospital consolidation in the 1980's and 1990's), and now that there are regulations the individual insurance market is passable rather than the continuous death spiral that it was in before.

And of course as I didn't say in that message but is obviously true, the ACA has led to far more people carrying health coverage than before. It's just that instead of the exchanges, it's the Medicaid expansion that has led to this. Even with Robert's unprincipled last minute rewrite and the 10 states that are still allowing their rural hospital system to be utterly gutted rather than giving Democrats the win, a higher percentage of people have health coverage than at any point in American history before the ACA, and that is entirely because of Obamacare. So that is why reinforcing the successful part (government insurance) and abandoning the failed part ("market reform") is so attractive.

The problem is that the health care market isn't a truly free market. Uwe Reinhardt, Princeton economist, wrote a lot about how it was a broken market, which is why every other developed country (including fairly libertarian states like Singapore and Chile) has significantly more government intervention than the US does- since it's not really much like a free market, unless you are willing to accept many, many more deaths for people like my mother, which I am not.